In 2008, Dominic Johnson-Hill won the British Chamber of Commerce in China's Entrepreneur of the Year award. Full of anticipation, he went to pick up his trophy at a ceremony, and waited patiently in the VIP room beforehand to be introduced to the Duke of York, presenter of the awards.

The Duke, however, never got round to making Johnson-Hill’s acquaintance – and the very affronted expat decided to take his revenge. Not only did he make a pointed dig at him when collecting the award (“And thanks to Prince Andrew, who didn’t want to talk to me earlier”), he decided, when the official photograph of the contestants was taken, to sourly flick two fingers up at the camera.

It sounds, one can't help but think, a little obnoxious – but it is exactly this type of brazenness which has made Johnson-Hill an unlikely celebrity in Beijing, his home for the last 18 years. The owner of Plastered, a trendy T-shirt retailer whose designs are frequently spotted on style-conscious Chinese celebrities, Johnson-Hill first made his name with a T-shirt which slapped a sunbathing woman in a bikini on top of a picture of the Great Wall of China. It was not, he admits, a design which would have particularly impressed a Western audience used to quirky clothes, but in 1990s Beijing, where the only T-shirts he ever saw were “decorated with pandas, or the slogan ‘I’ve climbed the Great Wall’”, it was undeniably new. Early in his career, he appeared on the Chinese equivalent of The Oprah Winfrey Show wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with his phone number, only made to resemble one of the grubby stickers left by drug dealers in Chinese phone boxes. His phone didn’t stop ringing for six months.

The concept behind Plastered hasn’t changed since those early designs. Johnson-Hill simply takes iconic images from everyday life in China, from subway tickets to old-fashioned food coupons to posters of Mao, and “plasters” them onto fabric. He set up his tiny, 13-foot square store in Beijing in 2005 with just £4000 in his pocket, and within three years was turning over an annual profit of over £80,000. The brand now has a branch in Shanghai, and has items stocked in 15 different outlets across China, as well as in the US, Holland and France.

It appeals, he says, to a customer base aged generally between 18 and 35; not expats, but young Chinese people who enjoy its tongue-in-cheek glance at their society. “What I’m doing is looking at Chinese culture as an outsider, and then throwing that culture back at them. I don’t think a Chinese person would have set it up – what I’ve done is reinvent things which they take for granted. In that way being an expat has really helped me.”

Johnson's Hill personal determination to make the brand a success has also played a role. A lack of money in the brand’s early days meant he was forced to think of unconventional ways to get attention. Stunts included posting a dildo decorated with the details of the brand to a celebrity “famous mainly for sleeping with lots and lots of women” and sending fashion editors pizzas with pictures of himself glued inside the box. So would he say he’s marketed himself as well as the store?

“Yes,” he says firmly. “I’ve definitely tried to make myself a brand. There’s nothing more appealing to the Chinese than a white guy trying to speak their language, so they’re always asking me on television. They like seeing someone who's really adapted to their culture, and who loves it so much. Everything I do is born out of a love of Beijing.”

Johnson-Hill, who lives near his flagship store with his Canadian wife and four children, is far happier now however than when he first arrived in the city. Educated at Rugby school, he performed badly in his A-levels, and left to travel the world soon after. He says he knew he’d never come back. “I hated being at a boarding school, being told what you could and couldn't do, not being able to mix with the locals, and always being judged before I even spoke to people. By going abroad, I knew I could re-make myself."

Beijing, however, was a different place in those days – “flat where it’s now high-rise, and with hardly any foreigners” – and he struggled to fit in. “I didn’t speak the language, and we even had to use different money to the Chinese. You felt really segregated.” Slowly, the city grew on him, and he became obsessed with exploring its culture and history. Now, he regards it as home, and jokes that he finds himself increasingly resentful of the expatriates he finds at every corner. “It’s like every Tom, Dick and Harry is here now. I hardly go out any more…"

Johnson-Hill has certainly made of an effort than many expatriates to become immersed in his new culture. He was the first foreigner to be elected to his local chamber of commerce, and he works hard with his colleagues there to boost what he calls “creative retail” in the area. When he first arrived, the street on which he set up his shop, Nanluoguxiang, was a quiet, primarily residential hutong: now, it is a bustling and trendy shopping area. Johnson-Hill, who is clearly no believer in false modesty, happily pats himself on the back for this transformation: “That street was built by me, and by people like me." The street’s burgeoning reputation is reflected in its rental charges – the shop's rent has soared from around £100 to over £2000 a month.

Rent, however, is the least of Johnson-Hill's problems. What he refers to as China's “lack of respect for intellectual property” has meant that his designs are now copied everywhere, and he barely has to walk 100 metres from the shop to find someone flogging copies of his wares for two-thirds of the price . He’s never bothered to take anyone to court (“it’s like stepping on weeds”) and has instead channelled his energy into forming partnerships with young, creative Chinese designers, with whom he can produce fresh designs. “We produce 80 per cent of the designs in-house, but we’ve had some really great collaborations recently. Once it was difficult to find inventive Chinese designers, but the new generation is full of them.”

As for the picture of himself and the Duke of York – will that be making its way onto any T-shirts soon? Johnson-Hill demurs, and says that he doesn’t think very many of his compatriots have seen it. But didn’t he tell me earlier that the picture made it into one of the most popular English language newspapers in China?

“It did,” he says amusedly. “But they’d cut off my arm, and replaced my head with a picture of when I was smiling.”